I missed this Tea Party profile piece in the New York Times until Frank Rich pointed me to it. It seems to me that most of these tea partiers are conservative-minded but not really Republicans. I suspect very few of them have ever voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, for example. But they are not so dumb that they are unaware that Bush and Cheney screwed up the economy and violated the Constitution on a routine basis. The problem is, they’re still getting their information from FOX News and Glenn Beck. So, they’re being fed Republican propaganda and paranoid nonsense on a regular basis, and then they’re going online and reading truly crazy stuff on websites like WorldNetDaily.
How many of these folks are going to do something crazy like flying an airplane into a federal building? I don’t know, but they do pose a danger. What’s ironic is that the kind of government surveillance required to keep track of that danger just feeds their paranoia. But if you are palling around with people that are talking about taking up arms against the government, the government needs to know what else you’re doing.
Personally, I’m more offended by acts of terrorism carried out by acolytes of Glenn Beck than I am by people who have actual geo-political goals behind their actions, but both of them result in dead Americans, so both of them need to be treated the same way.
One piece of constructive advice I have for the people who are working to organize a Tea Party is that you’ll never succeed in sending people to Washington to be your federal representatives and then having them vote against the federal government doing anything. That’s just something Republicans say they are going to do when they are out of power. Lately, they’ve started voting that way, but it will last only so long as they are in the minority and then they will go back to building up huge deficits, cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and generally doing the bidding of Wall Street. It’s just the nature of the federal government that if you control it, you use it to do stuff. So, if you are a Tea Party proponent, you can’t fool yourself into thinking that you can find some leader who will do jackshit about the power of the federal government. What you can do is work with civil libertarians and progressive Democrats to protect our privacy rights and Net Neutrality.
